 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Brought to you by Red Hat. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante. Today we're going to give you a quick preview of AnsibleFest virtual. That's taking place October 13th. Now Ansible is an automation tool set. It addresses the elapsed time and quality challenges of deploying infrastructure and of course applications. Now with me to give a peek at this space is Stu Miniman co-host of theCUBE and senior analyst at Wikibon. Stu, good to see you. Great to see you too, Dave. Hey, let's talk about AnsibleFest. You know, what's in it for me? Who should attend and why? Yeah, so Dave, it's our second year doing theCUBE there. Last year, John Furrier and I did it. It was a great show. So much, especially important for developers. We know we've been talking for years about the importance of automation. But what we want to address specifically is the IT decision makers. One of the things that I took away from last year's event is it's great when software can actually be a unifying factor inside a company. So it's not just the devs, but the business owner, the product owners all can get in that tool. And Ansible has actually brought back there's a track for IT decision makers because Dave, we know CIOs, as you say, they want to not only cost, but really make sure that we're driving the business forward. We've been talking for years about making sure that the development team, IT in general is aligned in driving with the business, supporting the business. And we know the top priority is being able to react fast, especially in today's times. So there's that track for IT decision makers today. Okay, great. And of course, we've been talking for months on theCUBE about the automation mandate. Frankly, we've been talking for years about it. But there was some reticence about automation. And automation scares people. But really, since COVID, things have really changed. And what I call the automation mandate has come front and center. We're seeing that in the spending data from our friends at ETR. From your perspective, how has COVID shifted the priorities of IT in developers in 2020? Yeah, Dave, as you said, we've been talking about this for years and it isn't something new. Last year, a lot of the shows automation was one of the top priorities. And it was, we've gone beyond what humans can do alone. So we need the machines to help us. But as you said, with COVID, first of all, we can't get everybody together as much. We want to make sure that people can work asynchronously when they do so. Automation has always been a piece of the toolkit for developers and just so important today. And we really want to make sure the track here for IT business leaders is to make sure that they're in alignment, that we're all communicating because as we know, Dave, it can't just be a waterfall of, well, here's our objective and we need to build new things. It's the whole business needs to be aligned. And so therefore, they're going to have some great customer stories. I know last year, John and I did some good customer interviews. This year, they've got Blue Cross Blue Shield and T-Mobile sharing, not only what their developers do, but the business outcomes, which is so important here. So that with COVID going on, Dave, it's even more important that automation be front and center. Not only is it good for the business, but it's going to help the employee overall, that EX that we've talked about so much, which of course translates to the CX customer experience and the employee experience. Automation, absolutely one of those top things we need to think about this year. You know, Stu, one of the concerns people have is security. And my argument, I set it up top, is that if you can improve quality, it seems to me you can improve security. We've certainly seen this in the world of RPA and bringing things like Six Sigma to business process, which used to be too expensive, but what's your take on automation and security? Yeah, right, Dave, for too many years, it was like, well, you know, if automation might break things. Number one is anybody that's done manual configuration knows humans can make mistakes and that actually could leave us open for more security hacks and breaches. But the other thing, if you look at the state of DevOps report, so we just interviewed Gene Kim recently at event, it's one of those, you know, best research out there. We know that if you deploy more often, if you're using CI CD, if you're actually moving faster and building security into the entire process, it is much better than the old model of doing security as a bolt-on or an afterthought. We know Dave's security is everyone's responsibility and it needs to be a consideration when I bake automation in absolutely something that I expect people to hear front and center in the stories as well as the solutions from Ansible. Where can people register for Ansible Fest too? Yeah, Dave, nice and easy, ansiblefest.com will get them to the site. As I said, there's lots of great content. What I've been enjoying the virtual events, Dave, not only are there the live rally points, but you can go back and really dig into all the content on demand after, which absolutely I expect here at this event just like the events we've been doing with Cube 365. All right, thanks for watching everybody. Go to ansiblefest.com register. You'll see John Furrier is doing a lot of the interviews. This is Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman on theCUBE. We'll see you there.